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Compiz 0.9.2 Is Coming With Many New Changes

Phoronix: Compiz 0.9.2 Is Coming With Many New Changes

KDE's KWin developers haven't been the only ones busy, but those working on Compiz have been active too and are currently preparing for the Compiz 0.9.2 release, which will succeed the belated Compiz 0.9 release that occurred back in July...

Instead of adding more features, maybe some of the fundamental problems should be tackled (i.e. performance, tearing avoidance).

I've never encountered performance issues in Compiz and I've used it on some pretty crummy hardware. As for tearing, I have encountered that but it's not been the fault of Compiz but rather video drivers lacking vsync and DRI2's redirected video lacking any syncing of it's own.

Originally Posted by drelyn86

or maybe adding something useful, like dynamic tiling. That would be pretty nice.

Agreed. I made one such suggestion recently but I have no idea how much, or how little, people actually read the Compiz forums. Compiz has some really useful plugins and some that could be more useful, if better implemented (Group and Tab, for instance) but that part of it's feature set portfolio hasn't seen much progress for several years now.

The reason why I ended up switching away is that, although it has the best and smoothest 3d effects, it is simply not one of the best window managers out there. I find myself going back to KWin all the time, since it is simply very good at managing windows.

Performance in general isn't a big issue (except for slow hardware), but recently performance of some plugins regressed... for example, with newer (stable, i.e. 0.8.x) versions of Compiz, the "zoom" and "expo" plugins are very slow.

As for tearing, this is limited by the Composite protocol, which has no way to effectively work around it. You can configure Compiz to "mostly" vsync, but it's not working correctly in most cases, like video playback or regular X rendering.

This needs to be fixed at a lower level, but apparently nobody is really interested in it - it is really annoying! NVidia suggested an extension for providing sync primitives a while ago, but there was practically zero reaction.

Sadly, while Compiz has its share of problems, kwin and mutter are a lot worse in most aspects.